Starvation in occupied Oleshky: How residents survive on pigeons, dog food and desperation

“The best way is to catch them with corn. Make a hole in a corn kernel with a needle. Then tie several kernels to a fishing line. Tie the line where pheasants and ducks often walk. The bird swallows the seed, and the line keeps it from going farther. In my opinion, it is better to put the bait under a wooden box, but where can you find a box these days…”

In Oleshky, people have been going hungry for the fourth month: only one store is operating, food appears there extremely rarely, and people must stand in enormous lines for several hours to get any. And then pay astronomical prices.

hromadske investigated why this is happening and how locals are surviving the humanitarian crisis.

Corpses rot in the basement, the road of death, the city’s isolation

After the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and the flooding (June 6, 2023), centralized water supply disappeared in Oleshky, along with electricity and gas. The city is under round-the-clock shelling — literally. This is an active front line.

Men are also disappearing without a trace in Oleshky. They are taken to torture chambers and forced to fight. Locals are dying from shelling, exhaustion and illness because there are no medicines. They asked us to report that for the past two months the dead have not been buried: bodies are kept in the hospital morgue, which has no electricity. The smell has already started. But relatives cannot take the dead and bury them because an autopsy is required, and it is performed in another city that no one can reach now.

Over the years of occupation, after Oleshky was captured on February 24, 2022, many people have evacuated from the city.

Of the 24,000 residents who lived here before the invasion, volunteers say only about 2,000 remain. Most are elderly people with limited mobility, and those who care for them. Some have returned from evacuation, unable to settle into the cramped "bed-space" arrangements elsewhere. Men often stay because they fear failing enemy filtration at checkpoints.

Finding official work in the city is only possible at the hospital or in municipal services. All the "good" jobs are taken. Unofficial work exists—fixing someone’s car, tidying up the cemetery, chopping firewood, or caring for elderly neighbors in exchange for payment from their children who have left.

Many residents lost or ruined their documents in the flood or fires after strikes. The hardest situation is for those without savings, because even help from relatives on the Ukrainian side is now impossible to receive (they managed until winter). The “currency exchangers” who used to exchange hryvnias for rubles at wild rates have disappeared from the city.

The already difficult situation in Oleshky became even worse after three cars carrying food were blown up on the only road into the city. In particular, a local trader who was bringing pensions and bread from Skadovsk was shot. The money was stolen, and photos of the driver with loaves of bread scattered around him circulated on Russian social media groups.

The road is still called the “road of death”: it is mined, controlled from above by drones, bodies lie along the shoulders — torn apart by dogs — and burned-out cars stand there.

In the city itself, there are almost no intact cars left. The only vehicle that left Oleshky in winter was the ambulance. Every few days, it took wounded civilians to Skadovsk. On the way back, it brought food. On several occasions, local carriers managed to reach the only store. Profiteers often grabbed the food first to resell at a profit. That food (if anyone got any), home reserves, the tiny market where locals sometimes traded, and the single handout from the occupation authorities — that is what Oleshky lived on in January, February, and March.

Diary of an animal volunteer: “Milk sausage arrived”

Among the Oleshky residents the newsroom managed to contact, two keep diaries, excerpts from which we share here.

Alla Lykhman-Malysh, who runs an animal shelter for pets abandoned by their owners on donations — there are about a hundred animals now — cannot leave the city because of them. From her notes, we selected only the parts about food, although there are also entries about a strike at her house, the death of animals, and the disappearance of her husband.

“2026.

January 9. The city is without bread again.

January 14. Problems with food again, we are finishing our reserves.

January 29. I face a difficult choice — whom to feed, because food is at zero. The option of cooking something is impossible — there is nothing. People have not seen bread for a month. No deliveries of food or anything else so far. Total blockade.

February 24. The city looks more and more like the movie Life After People is a popular science documentary produced for the History Channel, in which scientists discuss what would happen to the United States, its animals, and its plants if humans were to disappear, as well as how long the monuments and artifacts created by humanity would survive after our extinction.Life After People. But there are still people in the city, and they have nothing to eat. Sometimes people do not even have ingredients for the most meager dishes. I met a woman who said she wants bread, but she does not even have flour for a flatbread. She has money, but she cannot buy anything. She wanted to bake something so badly that she ground leftover macaroni in a meat grinder, added water, and yeast. You can imagine what kind of recipe that was. I hung a package of flour on her fence. There is a food catastrophe in the city! I no longer know which doors to knock on so they will open!

March 5 (photo shows a piece of sausage and yeast — ed.). That is the entire purchase for the last two months. Almost two hours in line, but even that was not enough for everyone. When the line had already formed — nearly 50 people — five loaded drones flew in. Everyone ran wherever they could. As a result, two people were killed and 11 were wounded. At the hospital (meaning sales from the ambulance that brings food for medics; leftovers are sometimes sold to those who want them — ed.), they brought sausage and candies. Our profiteers learn nothing from the war. They grabbed boxes, and again, there was not enough for ordinary people, and not everyone has the strength to fight their way through.

March 21. Milk sausage arrived. You need strong nerves to buy anything there. My neighbor was taken straight to the emergency room on a stretcher because she felt ill and fainted. There are no vegetables or fruits for sale at all.

April 4. The ice of the food crisis in our city has begun to crack a little. If you have purchasing power, you can at least buy something (Alla lists prices; they will be given separately — ed.). Profiteers, of course, descend like vultures on the food, and prices fly from astronomical to somewhere in a distant galaxy. To buy at more reasonable prices in the only store, which sometimes works, you have to stand for about six hours for whatever is left.”

Her words are confirmed by relatives on the west bank who stay in touch with Oleshky residents: there have been push-and-shoves and fights in food lines. Not everyone had the strength or health to endure it, or to stand in the cold all day.

Diary of a woman caring for an elderly relative: “We really will have to survive hunger”

Other entries come from the diary of Yulia (name changed for safety). The woman lives with her husband and his elderly aunt. Her house has been hit eight times.

“2026.

January 20. Bread and food are no longer delivered to the city. They brought something to the Katiusha [store] once, on January 18. The bread ran out immediately as it was being unloaded. There was a huge line for other products, and everything ran out quickly. After that, Katiusha never opened again. For a week now, I have been baking bread in a frying pan. The temperature in the house is about zero — the water in the bucket has frozen and does not melt, although it stands by the entrance to the hall, next to the stove…

January 26. Every Monday, the liveliest market is near the hospital. So I decided to go see — maybe something would be there. As always, fried pies were on sale, and one woman sold aspic in disposable plates. But I doubted the quality of those pies and aspic. R. was selling mayonnaise, ketchup, and some leftover canned goods — there was a line. One woman was selling macaroni from humanitarian aid; I saw two portion packets of Hercules porridge with her. I took them for Grandma. Someone was selling their own preserves.

I met S. She says people are dying, and no coffins are brought in — not even the ‘paper’ ones as before. People are buried in black bags. S. makes his rounds through the city with the workers, hauling away the deceased on a makeshift hospital trolley.

January 30. I went to the main market — no food was delivered. No trading. Leftovers are being sold (coffee, tea, spices, macaroni), and even those at triple the price.

January 31. What a thrill it was to discover a packet of cornflakes and two bags of chocolate pillows in the back of the cupboard, leftovers from two years back. I used dried carrots that I dried a year and a half ago and kept meaning to throw out.

February 5. Food is still not delivered to the city. The market is still not working. At home the only vegetables left are frozen potatoes and pumpkin.

February 10. I learned that on the 9th humanitarian aid would be handed out. I never took humanitarian aid from them (the Russians — ed.) before, but this time there was no choice. The picture still stands in my head of me walking in complete solitude past burned and destroyed apartment buildings. Underfoot — broken stones, drone fragments, strands of agro-fiber… Not a soul…

Food is given only to pensioners with Russian passports and Russian pensions. For pensioners over 80 there is a concession — they are allowed to receive it with a Ukrainian pension certificate.

About ten people in total. And who would come here anyway? It is far and dangerous for the elderly. The package contains four packs of spaghetti, a kilogram of buckwheat, a bottle of sunflower oil, four cans of stew and two cans of condensed milk. No sugar, no salt, no fish preserves, no flour.

February 11. Four private cars drove to Skadovsk for food and pensions. On the way back, near Hola Prystan, a drone hit the first car; it overturned and caught fire. The driver jumped out, but three people burned. The others witnessed this tragedy.

February 12. Thursday — market day near the hospital. I walked by — no food was delivered. People stood around and then left.

February 15. It looks like we really will have to survive hunger. At first, we hoped they would clear the roads of snow, remove the mines — and cars would start driving again. But the snow and ice melted, the roads are clear, and cars keep getting blown up. Drones keep attacking. Who would want to come here?

February 16. Market day again. I went. A lot of people. Dressed in whatever they had. Cold. They stand, talk, wait. Pensioners, many with very limited mobility. They stood again and left. They sold their cut-up pumpkins, preserves, honey. They do not even sell pies anymore — probably flour ran out. I met R.; her son is selling goods in Skadovsk, but he is afraid to drive to Oleshky.

March 19. I go to the market. At the intersection lies the body of a Russian soldier. His face has been eaten by dogs. For people this is no longer surprising: bodies with gnawed limbs and pecked by birds lie around the city.”

Separately the woman says they kept chickens so they would lay eggs. When there was nothing to feed them, they gave the birds semolina.

Yulia’s relative, Ukrainian journalist Maria Semenchenko, added her comment:

“When I talk to relatives in occupation, I fear for them and it hurts, because they are in danger, in hunger, and most importantly — we do not know how to help. Sending money has become impossible. My relative says she could not dull the feeling of hunger because you cannot get full on canned vegetables and dried fruit. Besides, the fear of hunger pressed on her: what about tomorrow? What to feed Grandma? And despite these sufferings, they asked how we are doing here in Kyiv.”

“Dogs shared their food with us”

Natalia does not leave Oleshky because her home is there, and as a pensioner, she cannot afford to buy housing elsewhere. She sits in the basement with her mother. She sits and trembles — for her mother and for her dogs that run around the yard.

“We’ve lost so much weight these past months,” she says. “Food was delivered to the store twice, but the lines were so long I couldn't bear to stand in them. Plus, the ‘UFOs’ (drones—ed.) were circling overhead. What saved us was that I’d stocked up on grains for the dogs for the winter. So, they ended up sharing with my mom and me.”

This spring, everyone is planting gardens. People level craters and pits and plant. Natalia is throwing flowers out of the small flowerbed near the house to plant vegetables instead. The women receive no payments because they did not want to take Russian documents. So what do they live on?

“We are eating dirt,” Natalia admits. Before the war, she sold a plot of land near Kherson and is now living on those savings, spending them very carefully.

According to her and two other local women, people in extreme exhaustion have come to the hospital. One man said he had not eaten for a week.

Local resident Ruslan himself saw a man on the street who looked drunk but was actually weak from hunger.

People hunted pheasants (many appeared after the flooding), ducks, hares, and pigeons.

Product prices

Prices for products obtained from various sources are given in rubles. Everything is for one kilogram, eggs are for a dozen.

• Meat — from 1,000 rubles ($13).
• Sausage — 1,000-1,500 rubles ($13-20).
• Cheese — 1,500 rubles ($20).
• Potatoes — 250 rubles ($3).
• Eggs — from 200-300 rubles ($3-4) (in the store) to 600 rubles ($8) (at the market), 1,000 rubles ($13) (from speculators).
• Dog food (15 kilograms) — 7,000 rubles ($93).
• Loaf of bread — 100-150 rubles ($1-2).
• Pack of butter (200 grams) — 400 rubles ($5).

People moved in together, rejoiced over carrots

People helped one another to survive. During the isolation of Oleshky, the Ukrainian military dropped several packages of food and medicine on the city from drones.

Living in apartments is extremely hard, so announcements sometimes appear in local groups asking whether owners (who have left) allow someone to move into their house. Owners gladly agree, because it is better to have their own people than occupiers.

Those who have a generator allow acquaintances to charge their phones.

Yulia wrote in her diary:

“We neighbors share whatever we can with one another. Once, V. gave me a small loaf of bread (from a Baptist meeting, I think). It was baked from some kind of gray flour—it looked terrible, gray and stale—but it was real bread. I took some of it over to H. We’ve never been so happy to see a crust of bread!

V. also treated me to a carrot that a friend had given her from her cellar. A carrot! A real one! I still had some mayonnaise left (bought before the snow started), so I made a salad of grated carrots with garlic and mayo. I brought some to H. My God, you should have seen the surprise and joy in her eyes.

V. managed to find a bit of flour from somewhere, so we can still make fritters. I’ve gotten used to making them using H.’s recipe: using tomato juice as a base instead of sour milk. I even started adding fine corn grits to the flour just to make it last longer...”

If a man knows how to repair cars, he trades his services for food.

Olena, who left Oleshky at the end of March and is now in Lviv Oblast, said she became friends with a lonely neighbor and invited him to live with her:

“He has gas heating and wouldn't have survived, but I have a wood-burning stove and had wood stocked up. We planted potatoes together, harvested them together, and canned tomatoes and cucumbers. We shared what we had with others, and that’s how we survived ourselves—sometimes bartering potatoes for flour.

Once, a neighbor boy brought us three pigeons he’d caught, so I made a soup. The winter was brutal; we heard of people dying from hunger and the cold. Mostly those who were all alone and had nothing to fall back on.”

Olena left; the neighbor stayed in her house. To help him survive the next winter, she helped him plant potatoes and grow tomato and eggplant seedlings. He has enough gasoline for the generator to water the garden, and there is still a “canister” of fuel to saw firewood.

What's next?

“People were starving for one reason: there were no logistics,” says volunteer Kseniya Arkhipova, who is from these parts and helps locals. “Even if you have a million rubles, you cannot buy anything because no one delivers anything.”

The situation shifted just before Easter. Supplies began trickling into the city weekly. Word was that the occupation administration had partially demined the road—partly for their own movement, and partly, perhaps, due to some back-channel agreements sparked by the outcry over the hunger in Oleshky on Telegram. The exact reason remained a mystery.

Locals, their relatives on the west bank, and volunteers also sent requests to various Ukrainian ministries, the Office of the President, Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets, and international organizations.

So far, there has been a reaction from Lubinets. According to Kseniya Arkhipova, his office is calling Oleshky residents and asking whether they want to evacuate.

Apparently, about 200 people want to. And the Russian Red Cross is ready to take bedridden patients to the pedestrian crossing into Ukraine.

Maria Semenchenko’s relatives are ready to evacuate despite not wanting to leave their house to the occupiers. But the time has come to say goodbye to it.

The hromadske newsroom also sent requests to the International Red Cross and the office of the Ukrainian commissioner, but has not yet received answers.

While this report was being prepared, on April 15, a car with gas cylinders blew up at the entrance to Oleshky; the driver was wounded. The car with the food that was following turned around. As of April 16 the only store was empty. On April 19, a message appeared in local chats that there would be no delivery and people need to “ration their food.”